Magic Terror (22 page)

Yet even then, remembering the unhealthy-looking man who each night entered the club to drop into the nearest chair, I experienced a wobble of doubt. Maybe the great man’s life was nothing like my imaginings. Hat wore decent clothes but did not seem rich—he seemed to exist at the same oblique angle to worldly success that his nightly variations on “Too Marvelous for Words” bore to the original melody. For a moment, I pictured my genius in a slum apartment where roaches scuttled across a bare floor and water dripped from the ceiling. I had no idea of how jazz musicians actually lived. Hollywood, unafraid of cliché, surrounded them with squalor. On the rare moments when literature stooped to consider jazz people, it, too, served up an ambience of broken bedsprings and peeling walls. And literature’s bohemians—Rimbaud, Jack London, Kerouac, Hart Crane, William Burroughs—had often inhabited mean, unhappy rooms. It was possible that the great man was not listed in the city’s directories because he could not afford a telephone.

This notion was unacceptable. There had to be another explanation—Hat could not live in a tenement room without a telephone. The man possessed the elegance of his generation of jazz musicians, the generation that wore good suits and polished shoes, played in big bands, and lived on buses and in hotel rooms.

And there, I thought, was my answer. It was a comedown from the apartment in the Village with which I had supplied him, but a room in some “artistic” hotel like the Chelsea would suit him just as well, and probably cost a lot less in rent. Feeling inspired, I looked up the Chelsea’s number on the spot, dialed, and asked for Hat’s room. The clerk told me that he wasn’t registered in the hotel. “But you know who he is,” I said. “Sure,” said the clerk. “Guitar, right? I know he was in one of those San Francisco bands, but I can’t remember which one.”

I hung up without replying, realizing that the only way I was going to discover Hat’s telephone number, short of calling every hotel in New York, was by asking him for it.

5

This was on a Monday, and the jazz clubs were closed. On Tuesday, Professor Marcus told us to read all of
Vanity Fair
by Friday; on Wednesday, after I’d spent a nearly sleepless night with Thackeray, my seminar leader asked me to prepare a paper on James Joyce’s “Two Gallants” for the Friday class. Wednesday and Thursday nights I spent in the library. On Friday I listened to Professor Marcus being brilliant about
Vanity Fair
and read my laborious and dim-witted Joyce paper, on each of the five pages of which the word
epiphany
appeared at least twice, to my fellow scholars. The seminar leader smiled and nodded throughout my performance and when I sat down metaphorically picked up my little paper between thumb and forefinger and slit its throat. “Some of you kiddies are so
certain
about things,” he said. The rest of his remarks disappeared into a vast, horrifying sense of shame. I returned to my room, intending to lie down for an hour or two, and woke up ravenous ten hours later, when even the West End Bar, even the local Chock Full o’ Nuts, were shut for the night.

On Saturday night, I took my usual table in front of the bandstand and sat expectantly through the piano trio’s usual three numbers. In the middle of “Love Walked In” I looked around with an insider’s foreknowledge to enjoy Hat’s dramatic entrance, but he did not appear, and the number ended without him. John Hawes and the other two musicians seemed untroubled by this break in the routine and went on to play “Too Marvelous for Words” without their leader. During the next three songs, I kept turning around to look for Hat, but the set ended without him. Hawes announced a short break, and the musicians stood up and moved toward the bar. I fidgeted at my table, nursing my second beer of the night and checking the door. The minutes trudged by. I feared he would never show up. He had passed out in his room. He’d been hit by a cab, he’d had a stroke, he was already lying dead in a hospital room—just when I was going to write the article that would finally do him justice!

Half an hour later, still without their leader, John Hawes and other sidemen went back on the stand. No one but me seemed to have noticed that Hat was not present. The other customers talked and smoked—this was in the days when people still smoked—and gave the music the intermittent and sometimes ostentatious attention they allowed it even when Hat was on the stand. By now, Hat was an hour and a half late, and I could see the gangsterish man behind the bar, the owner of the club, scowling as he checked his wristwatch. Hawes played two originals I particularly liked, favorites of mine from his Contemporary records, but in my mingled anxiety and irritation I scarcely heard them.

Toward the end of the second of these songs, Hat entered the club and fell into his seat a little more heavily than usual. The owner motioned away the waiter, who had begun moving toward him with the customary shot glass. Hat dropped the porkpie on the table and struggled with his coat buttons. When he heard what Hawes was playing, he sat listening with his hands still on a coat button, and I listened, too—the music had a tighter, harder, more modern feel, like Hawes’s records. Hat nodded to himself, got his coat off, and struggled with the snaps on his saxophone case. The audience gave Hawes unusually appreciative applause. It took Hat longer than usual to fit the horn together, and by the time he was on his feet, Hawes and the other two musicians had turned around to watch his progress as if they feared he would not make it all the way to the bandstand. Hat wound through the tables with his head tilted back, smiling to himself. When he got close to the stand, I saw that he was walking on his toes like a small child. The owner crossed his arms over his chest and glared. Hat seemed almost to float onto the stand. He licked his reed. Then he lowered his horn and, with his mouth open, stared out at us for a moment. “Ladies, ladies,” he said in a soft, high voice. These were the first words I had ever heard him speak. “Thank you for your appreciation of our pianist, Mr. Hawes. And now I must explain my absence during the first set. My son passed away this afternoon, and I have been . . . busy . . . with details. Thank you.”

With that, he spoke a single word to Hawes, put his horn back in his mouth, and began to play a blues called “Hat Jumped Up,” one of his twenty songs. The audience sat motionless with shock. Hawes, the bassist, and the drummer played on as if nothing unusual had happened—they must have known about his son, I thought. Or maybe they knew that he had no son, and had invented a grotesque excuse for turning up ninety minutes late. The club owner bit his lower lip and looked unusually introspective. Hat played familiar, uncomplicated figures, his tone rough, almost coarse. At the end of his solo, he repeated one note for an entire chorus, fingering the key while staring toward the back of the club. Maybe he was watching the customers leave—three couples and a couple of single people walked out while he was playing. But I don’t think he saw anything at all. When the song was over, Hat leaned over to whisper to Hawes, and the piano player announced a short break. The second set was over.

Hat put his tenor on top of the piano and stepped down off the bandstand, pursing his mouth with concentration. The owner had come out from behind the bar and moved in front of him as Hat tiptoed around the stand. The owner spoke a few quiet words. Hat answered. From behind, he looked slumped and tired, and his hair curled far over the back of his collar. Whatever he had said only partially satisfied the owner, who spoke again before leaving him. Hat stood in place for a moment, perhaps not noticing that the owner had gone, and resumed his tiptoe glide toward the door. Looking at his back, I think I took in for the first time how genuinely
strange
he was. Floating through the door in his gray flannel suit, hair dangling in ringletlike strands past his collar, leaving in the air behind him the announcement about a dead son, he seemed absolutely separate from the rest of humankind, a species of one.

I turned as if for guidance to the musicians at the bar. Talking, smiling, greeting a few fans and friends, they behaved just as they did every other night. Could Hat really have lost a son earlier today? Maybe this was the jazz way of facing grief—to come back to work, to carry on. Still, it seemed the worst of all times to approach Hat with my offer. His playing was a drunken parody of itself. He would forget anything he said to me; I was wasting my time.

On that thought, I stood up and walked past the bandstand and opened the door—if I was wasting my time, it didn’t matter what I did.

He was leaning against a brick wall about ten feet up the alleyway from the club’s back door. The door clicked shut behind me, but Hat did not open his eyes. His face tilted up, and a sweetness that might have been sleep lay over his features. He looked exhausted and insubstantial, too frail to move. I would have gone back inside the club if he had not produced a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, lit it with a match, and then flicked the match away, all without opening his eyes. At least he was awake. I stepped toward him, and his eyes opened. He glanced at me and blew out white smoke. “Taste?” he said.

I had no idea what he meant. “Can I talk to you for a minute, sir?” I asked.

He put his hand into one of his jacket pockets and pulled out a half-pint bottle. “Have a taste.” Hat broke the seal on the cap, tilted it into his mouth, and drank. Then he held the bottle out toward me.

I took it. “I’ve been coming here as often as I can.”

“Me, too,” he said. “Go on, do it.”

I took a sip from the bottle—gin. “I’m sorry about your son.”

“Son?” He looked upward, as if trying to work out my meaning. “I got a son—out on Long Island. With his momma.” He drank again and checked the level of the bottle.

“He’s not dead, then.”

He spoke the next words slowly, almost wonderingly. “Nobody . . . told . . . me . . . if . . . he . . . is.” He shook his head and drank another mouthful of gin. “Damn. Wouldn’t that be something, boy dies and nobody tells me? I’d have to think about that, you know, have to really
think
about that one.”

“I’m talking about what you said on stage.”

He cocked his head and examined an empty place in the dark air about three feet from his face. “Uh-huh. That’s right. I did say that. Son of mine passed.”

It was like dealing with a sphinx. All I could do was plunge in. “Well, sir, actually there’s a reason I came out here,” I said. “I’d like to interview you. Do you think that might be possible? You’re a great artist, and there’s very little about you in print. Do you think we could set up a time when I could talk to you?”

He looked at me with his bleary, colorless eyes, and I wondered if he could see me at all. And then I felt that, despite his drunkenness, he saw everything—that he saw things about me that I couldn’t see.

“You a jazz writer?” he asked.

“No, I’m a graduate student. I’d just like to do it. I think it would be important.”

“Important.” He took another swallow from the half-pint and slid the bottle back into his pocket. “Be nice, doing an
important
interview.”

He stood leaning against the wall, moving farther into outer space with every word. Only because I had started, I pressed on: I was already losing faith in this project. The reason Hat had never been interviewed was that ordinary American English was a foreign language to him. “Could we do the interview after you finish up at this club? I could meet you anywhere you like.” Even as I said these words, I despaired. Hat was in no shape to know what he had to do after this engagement finished. I was surprised he could make it back to Long Island every night.

Hat rubbed his face, sighed, and restored my faith in him. “It’ll have to wait a little while. Night after I finish here, I go to Toronto for two nights. Then I got something in Hartford on the thirtieth. You come see me after that.”

“On the thirty-first?” I asked.

“Around nine, ten, something like that. Be nice if you brought some refreshments.”

“Fine, great,” I said, wondering if I would be able to take a late train back from wherever he lived. “But where on Long Island should I go?”

His eyes widened in mock horror. “Don’t go nowhere on Long Island. You come see me. In the Albert Hotel, Forty-ninth and Eighth. Room 821.”

I smiled at him—I had guessed right about one thing, anyhow. Hat did not live in the Village, but he did live in a Manhattan hotel. I asked him for his phone number, and wrote it down, along with the other information, on a napkin from the club. After I folded the napkin into my jacket pocket, I thanked him and turned toward the door.

“Important as a motherfucker,” he said in his soft, slurry voice.

I turned around in alarm, but he had tilted his head toward the sky again, and his eyes were closed.

“ ’Indiana,’” he said. His voice made the word seem sung. “ ’Moonlight in Vermont.’ ’I Thought About You.’ ’Flamingo.’”

He was deciding what to play during his next set. I went back inside, where twenty or thirty new arrivals, more people than I had ever seen in the club, waited for the music to start. Hat soon reappeared through the door, the other musicians left the bar, and the third set began. Hat played all four of the songs he had named, interspersing them through his standard repertoire during the course of an unusually long set. He was playing as well as I’d ever heard him, maybe better than I’d heard on all the other nights I had come to the club. The Saturday-night crowd applauded explosively after every solo. I didn’t know if what I was seeing was genius or desperation.

An obituary in the Sunday
New York Times
, which I read over breakfast the next morning in the John Jay cafeteria, explained some of what had happened. Early Saturday morning, a thirty-eight-year-old tenor saxophone player named Grant Kilbert had been killed in an automobile accident. One of the most successful jazz musicians in the world, one of the few jazz musicians known outside of the immediate circle of fans, Kilbert had probably been Hat’s most prominent disciple. He had certainly been one of my favorite musicians. More important, from his first record,
Cool Breeze
, Kilbert had excited respect and admiration. I looked at the photograph of the handsome young man beaming out over the neck of his saxophone and realized that the first four songs on
Cool Breeze
were “Indiana,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “I Thought About You,” and “Flamingo.” Sometime late Saturday afternoon, someone had called up Hat to tell him about Kilbert. What I had seen had not merely been alcoholic eccentricity; it had been grief for a lost son. And when I thought about it, I was sure that the lost son, not himself, had been the important motherfucker he’d addressed. What I had taken for spaciness and disconnection had all along been irony.